Created by joining two machine guns into a single unit, the Villa Perosa could fire 1200-1500 rounds per minute.

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By Ian McCollum

Oct 23, 2015

The Villar Perosa is one of the most unusual machine guns ever produced. It was designed in Italy in 1914, and adopted the next year by the Italian military. The machine gun was still a fairly new technology at the time, and there wasn't necessarily a consensus on how to best use them.

The Villar Perosa machine gun was actually two separate identical machine guns mounted together in a single fixture. The guns were chambered for the 9mm Glisenti cartridge (dimensionally the same as the 9mm Luger but loaded with a somewhat weaker powder charge) and fed from 25-round box magazines. The two guns each fired at a rate of 1200-1500 rounds per minute, meaning that they would empty a 25-round magazine in no more than 1.25 seconds. That made for a lot of reloading!

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At first, the guns were intended to be mounted on aircraft, where they would be used by observers to shoot at opposing planes. The 9mm Glisenti is a fairly weak pistol cartridge, however, and as aircraft became more robust, the Villar Perosa was rendered ineffective as an anti-aircraft weapon. Instead, the guns were put into infantry service.

The two guns would empty a 25-round magazine in no more than 1.25 seconds.

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Now, since the gun was initially developed for use on aircraft it did not have a shoulder stock or a traditional trigger. It was to be mounted on a flexible ring mount, and it had a pair of spade-style grips with thumb triggers. When repurposing the guns for ground use, they were mounted on tripods and their spade grips left unchanged.

The dilemma with this use was that it failed to appreciate how the guns would actually be used in practice. The weak pistol cartridge they used limited the useful range of the guns to no more than 100-200 yards. However, the tripods and lack of shoulder stocks meant that the guns had to be placed in fixed positions in protected trenches where they were often many hundreds of yards from enemy positions.

In its intended use as a light machine gun for infantry support it was a failure due to its lack of range and small magazine capacity combined with its high rate of fire. It was more successfully used by Italian alpine troops, who lacked any other machine gun that was portable enough for mountain use. Eventually, tactics were developed to use the Villar Perosa in walking fire (like a BAR, actually) with a sling or harness.

Other experiments were made, including mounting the guns to bicycle handlebars, but these were all pretty fanciful ideas and none of them proved practical. It was not until the middle of 1918 that the Villar Perosa guns were finally made into practical weapons.

In 1918, two different arms companies took half-guns and fitted them with traditional shoulder stocks and triggers, making them into submachine guns in the modern practical style. By this time, the end of the war was virtually in sight, and the submachine guns were too late to have any significant effect on the conflict.

Ian McCollum is the founder of ForgottenWeapons.com, a website and YouTube channel dedicated preserving the history of rare and obscure guns from around the world.